CanoScan® LiDE 25 Review - How is its Performance?
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After a few hours of testing I could come to the conclusion that this scanner is perfect for use in the home or the small office. Its easy-to-use design and software provide users with literally one-touch scanning. You just put in the paper or photo, press the Scan button and it is already scanning. It also has an amazing feature named Quality Automatic Retouching and Enhancement -level 3- that significantly improves the image quality of old photos and documents.
This scanner does more than enough for an average user. Its price is also very affordable; being in the $50 price range makes it a budget performing scanner offering the best bang for the buck. It deserves that rating even though, to be realistic, when scanning photos or high quality images it was possible that their quality often was reduced. But it is good enough for everyday home or office use.
What could we expect more from $50? CanoScan LiDE 25 is perhaps not the best choice for high performance business use where professionals need perfect extra sharp quality scanning with incredible optical resolution and more advanced software bundles included. Amateur photographers would also call this scanner mediocre, but it's more than enough and most people won't notice the quality differences. Batch scanning is a nice feature for home usage when more than a few photos are going to be scanned; ArcSoft PhotoStudio can place the scanned images in separate folders while scanning multiple sources continuously. The OCR (optical character recognition) feature worked for me. I've put it through quite a few tests and every time it did a good job of recognition.
This scanner's only con in my point of view is its speed -- it's very slow, in part due to the USB 1.1 connection. On the medium-to-high resolution it can take a full minute to scan a simple photo. Lowering the resolution will speed up the process of scanning but will also result in lower quality results. That's why I can't stress more that this scanner is okay for home/office usage when casual scanning is attempted and there is no time stress from the back, and you can just enjoy the scanning procedure with patience. The scanning process would slow down business/office work when hundreds if not thousands of pages need to be scanned and other workers are depending on those pages.
Okay, now let's see few numbers. How fast did it perform on my tests? Check the table below.
Scan Mode | Image Quality | Speed |
Black & White (A4) | 300 dpi (2480x3507x1) | 20 seconds |
Grayscale (A4) | 300 dpi (2480x3507x8) | 20 seconds |
Color (A4) | 300 dpi (2480x3507x24) | 57 seconds |
Grayscale (A4) | 75 dpi (620x876x8) | 17 seconds |
Color (A4) | 600 dpi (4498x7007x24) | 1 minute 54 seconds |
Color (A4) | 1200 dpi (9921x14031x24) | 7 minutes 30 seconds |
Analyze that table. You may say that at 1200dpi it's pretty damn slow. Yes, indeed it is. But keep in mind that that resolution is also pretty damn huge. The file in .BMP was more than 100 MB, of course; in compressed .JPG it was smaller. For personal use that 300dpi one is what I'm using and it perfectly suits my needs. In black and white, grayscale, or color, the scanning time is below one minute.
Also consider that it takes lots of time for your processor to render a huge image, especially if you're saving in .JPG. After a couple of scanning tests you can decide for sure which one is the best scanning resolution for you, and you can stick with it. When using the "e-mail" button the device automatically uses the 75 dpi method, but that's also more than enough. Imagine emailing photos in 9921x14031 resolution; that's insane.
Anyway, let's sum this review up and take a look at the pros and cons.
Next: Conclusions >>
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